Barcelona Christmas

In 2008 I was living in France and having a fabulous time doing incredibly stupid things across the European continent.  At Christmas time I decided to follow my friend to Spain where she knew a whole bunch of people, some of whom were willing to lend us their apartment while they were traveling.  This Christmas was absolutely filled with stories I could share, including how I had my first kiss in this apartment right after accidentally locking myself in the bathroom, which apparently some people find pretty sexy.  Who knew.  But that’s not the story I’m going to tell.  The story I have chosen is the story of how my friend and I ended up wandering the streets of Barcelona at 4 a.m. because we had forgotten to actually write down the address of this apartment before leaving it to have Christmas Eve adventures. 

 It started off amazing.  We spent the evening at an apartment with a number of expats from all over the world and danced until nearly 4 am, at which point we decided maybe it was a little late and we should go home.  It hadn’t occurred to us quite yet that we had no idea where home was.  We only knew the metro stop nearest the apartment, because that is where we had met our hosts earlier. Unfortunately, the metro in Barcelona closed at some point and wasn’t going to reopen until 6 a.m.  We could either wait two hours, or attempt to take a night bus which theoretically would drop us a few streets down from this metro stop.  We would just have to change buses once, and then ask the bus driver on the second bus to let us know when to get off. 

At 4 a.m, my friend and I were standing around shivering in the pre-dawn winter air at a deserted bus stop waiting for a bus we hoped would actually come.  After twenty minutes, it did.  Thank goodness, because the two of us were ready to collapse on the street and wait for the metro to open at 6. 

Which is what we should definitely have done.

But we weren’t that smart.

The bus itself was actually pretty crowded.  A lot of Christmas partiers. They say Spain is the country that knows how to party, and let me tell you, the stereotype doesn’t come from nowhere.  So I shouldn’t have been so surprised to find a packed bus full of slowly sobering people at 4:30 in the morning.  We took the bus no problem to Placa de Catalunya and got off, very proud of ourselves. 

Until we realized we had no idea where to find the bus we needed to transfer to. 

We walked all around the square, going up to every bus driver asking if they were the bus we wanted, and every time the driver pointed in some other direction.  It was a giant game of connect the dots but with buses, and we ran back and forth and around and across until finally we found a bus driver who said, yes, get on, this is your bus. 

Here we came to a problem.  My friend and I only knew what metro stop we were near.  No other significant markers, not even the name of the street we were on.  And the bus driver had never heard of this metro stop.  He advised us to ask the other passengers. 

It was so wonderful that my friend was a native Spanish speaker.

We  (my friend) started asking other passengers about this metro stop, but no one had heard of it.  We began to panic, because there was no way we would recognize anything, we didn’t even know the name of the street we were staying on, and…and…all around panic. Eventually though we found one man who said, oh yeah! Florída! Yes, yes, we’ll pass right by the metro there, you’ll just have get off the bus, walk a ways, turn left, turn right, and you’re right there.  He told us that we should get off at the stop after he did. 

This meant that around 5:30 in the morning we stepped off the bus into an area we had never seen before.  And could not remember how the man had told us how to find the metro.  What should we have done?  I’m still not really sure.  There was no one around to ask directions, we had no map…

Whatever we SHOULD have done, we certainly should absolutely not have done what we did.  Which was picked a direction and started walking.  My friends, please don’t ever find yourselves wandering a foreign city in the wee hours of the morning on Christmas day with all the drunk creepy people completely lost.  It is a BAD IDEA.  I cannot stress this enough.  Everyone says, do not go wandering alone in the night you could get murdered or raped or whatnot and you may kind of shrug it off and think, well, clearly bad things can happen but they probably won’t.

This is FOOLISH THINKING.  Some things maybe you have to learn the hard way.  I can tell you one thing, next time I’m taking a taxi no matter what.  This was a horrible experience.  We saw fights, we hid behind walls and in doorframes from crazy people, we ran to avoid groups of very drunk guys who looked indescribably frightening, and in the end we stopped on a street corner, horribly lost and afraid to go in any direction for fear of running into people or getting even farther from home. 

Finally, we saw a police car.  We started to run after it, hoping to catch their attention and get directions, or even better, a ride.  But we weren’t fast enough, and we stopped again on the sidewalk, dejected and despairing.  But miracle of miracles, the police car stopped just within our view.  Without saying a word both of us started to run at the same time towards the car, but before we made it the police officers jumped out of the car and ran into a building.  We slowed a little, and in the next few seconds, two more police cars showed up and stopped in front of the building.  All the officers got out and ran inside.  My friend and I looked at each other.  We couldn’t decide which was worse.  Continuing into the unknown, or waiting around by the police cars in front of a building where god knows what crime had been or was being committed.  There were a lot of police officers, so we were afraid it was a pretty big crime.  In the end we decided to wait, because criminals in handcuffs scared us less than the criminals running around loose on the streets. 

We waited about twenty minutes.  I have no idea what on earth those police officers were doing in there, perhaps having coffee and tea with the perpetrators, because they all came out together laughing and smiling, with no criminals in tow, and were quite surprised to see two frightened looking girls huddled together against one of their cars.  My friend took over, for obvious reasons, and got directions to our metro stop.  The police officer talking to us thought it was hilarious that a) we had gotten so lost, and b) we didn’t even know the name of the street we were staying on.

Travel tip #1, always know where you live. Could come in handy.  Travel tip #2, carry a map, because knowing where you live is often useless unless you know how to get there.

The policeman flirted like mad with both of us.  He told us nothing would happen to us in Barcelona, it’s a wonderfully safe city, and all we had to do was walk four blocks down and six blocks over and we’d be fine. 

We thanked them and walked until we were out of sight and then we ran until we got to our apartment.  We went to bed immediately.     

The next morning brought new madness and poor decisions, and the next week brought the amount of adventure some people don’t have in a lifetime.  Maybe this blog will revisit that week at some point in the future.